infernal machine

Sorry for the lack of posting lately. I broke my laptop. My claw, as I've taken to calling my left hand, had gotten precariously long nails. One of them got stuck under my tab key and popped the damn thing off. In my ham-handed attempt to fix it, I broke the little nylon thingamajig that held it in place.

As usual, the tech support folks at Dell were outstanding in their performance. (That's not a compliment.) They simply recommended that I spend $45 (not including shipping) on a new keyboard, which for a small fee ($30 at Best Buy) could be installed with no problem. Of course, Best Buy is only an hour away. So, we're talking about 15 more dollars for gas. Let's see, that makes it about $90, plus lunch.

The Mrs. dinna like that idea. She's usually opposed to spending any money at all on the computer, she hates the blasted things. More appropriately, she hates the time that I spend on them (I love them). As usual, she's right. I tend to fall into my own little world and ignore everything around me, spending hours on these machines, surfing the web, researching things I find interesting, but basically screwing around. And unfortunately the things that I do ignore (mostly my kids) are things that once lost can never be regained. This helps to explain the lack of posting over the last few days, that and laziness.

Oh yeah, back to the broken laptop. So I called every local computer repair shop and they told me the same thing, you have to replace the keyboard (and pay me lots of money to fix it). Notoriously cheap, (not frugal) I shopped around for days on the Internet. Finally, I found what I was looking for—at eBay of all places. Actually found a seller who finds laptops and such, and then tears them apart for all their little bits and pieces. The seller can provide me with the key that I need, and BOTH of the little nylon hookiedoos that will re-affix it to my keyboard. All for six bucks and I don't even have to leave the house. (For some reason, I feel like I might be turning into Howard Hughes, in his latter years...).

-- Chuck